There are two main groups of guilty parties. First, there is the online entrepreneur, always out to sell you something, always trying to get you to buy into something. These people are simply spammers and are generally very obvious. Most of their posts are links to something that is business- or profit-related. And most of us just sigh and turn them off.

The other online self-promoter is more insidious, and in my mind, much worse, for what they are promoting is themselves. Virtually (pun intended) their every post on every social media site is intended, in one way or another, to show how perfect they are or how cool they are, or both. Either way, they are just a drag. “Look at me, look at me,” they shout all day, “I’m cool, I’m so cool! You have to be my friend!”

They are not that great. Nobody is. They tell us all the wonderful things they do. They even make self-deprecating remarks to make them look modest, all the while blowing their own horns. It makes me nauseous. Promoting their own coolness tirelessly is also a major drag for al the rest of us. Like most people with horrid habits, they don’t even seem to know they do it.

Really wonderful people do not have to promote themselves; people notice how wonderful they are just by watching what they do. The constant self-promoters are clearly unable to walk the walk, so they just do the talk. Cool? Cool is fads surrounded by hype surrounded by spin surrounded by lies, all buried in the humus of the bull. To the persons in question, it is often also about making fun of everyone else, which they can do, of course, because they are so, so cool.

News flash, would-be wonderful, cool people: Both “cool” and “wonderful” are definitions that are rendered unto people by others, not whatever a person decides to tell us about himself.

That sort of behavior is fairly common in human children and young adults, and with older people who never outgrew the purely ego-centric personality. It is often caused by much deeper feelings of self-doubt and low self-esteem. Therefore, I should probably feel sorry for them, but I just can’t. They are just too annoying.

Worse, the social networking infrastructure is such that people are rewarded for being totally self-centered. Clearly, that makes it easier to fall into the bad habits that make them so tiresome to the rest of us. They have always been around, in real life. They have grown in number in the virtual world since they can hide behind the shield of anonymity that prevails on the Web. And now the Facebook and Twitter cultures are teaching a whole new generation that it is perfectly all right to say nothing that is not an announcement about themselves, generally in the interest of self-promotion.

Revolting.

Life is better all the way around. A new partner in life named Laura. A new dawg, maybe an English Setter, in the not-too-distant future. Three acres to mow, which keeps me on the lawn tractor a lot of the time in the summer. Books and computers everywhere, as has always been the case. A lot less stress, which is much healthier. I’m back to cooking a lot, which is marvelous. Everything is better that it has been in many, many years.

How about you?

What point is served when my ears are deafened by self-blown horns, my scruples are sullied by the narcissistic minority which feels that manufactured cool is the only meaningful end, my mind is besieged by those whose best efforts are aimed at glorifying themselves while demeaning others, my intelligence is insulted by the eighty percent who do nothing of import, and can only venerate the boastful and self-important?

It is clear that I was  born in the wrong century, or the wrong dimension, or the wrong universe. I value intelligence, quiet competence, unadvertised charity, the pragmatic, the esoteric, quality over quantity, building up over tearing down, a logical left brain, a creative right brain, and balance. I am certain that my value is minimal when compared to the universe at large. I know that I can control only myself, and that only with difficulty.

It is not that I am spectacularly unworthy. It is rather that I am conscious of my relative worth, understand upon reflection that I am but a tiny speck of protoplasm, short-lived and consigned to a backwater. I aspire to ignore the pompous and the asinine, to pity the builders of shrines to themselves, to lament the sheep who can only follow, and to deplore the arrogant who feel qualified to lead.

Knowing that I am a relatively competent human being, even though that counts for little in the grand scheme, should be its own reward. Observing the loud, the arrogant, and the self-righteous for what they are should insure my understanding of the rewards of the fool, and give some comfort to life in a minor eddy. However, among my many failings is the occasional need to cry out in the darkness, to lament the status quo, to climb back aboard the sway-backed steed and to fly the banner of reason.

Those sorties are short-lived, at best, because the pretenders are legion and I am but one, too proud to capitulate, too stupid to retire with grace. With wisdom, I would negate the advice of John Donne, pare my life to the minimum, retire to an island, and pull up the drawbridge for good and foever. When you have sought everywhere, and belong nowhere, lonely discretion may be the better part of vainglorious valor.

Although we have access to that specific kind of “more” on the internet, you lose as much in richness of experience as you gain in variety. You can “see” the Mona Lisa, or The Scream, on the Web, thousands of times. But none of those times include the experience of breathing the air, or drinking in the sights of the museum, of experiencing the entirety of the feeling of the place and activity surrounding the painting.

If you are researching something, you get words and photographs that are several steps removed from the experience surrounding your subject. You can “see” the mountain, but you cannot smell or feel the air. You can “see” the surface of the planet, but you cannot have the experience of traveling there, or feeling your weight change in a different gravity. You can “watch” a video of a play, but not feel the intimacy intended by the author, seeing and hearing the actors as they move and speak in three dimensions in space you share with them.

For better or for worse, the same differences in the parameters of the virtual and physical worlds hold true for those people with whom we interact only on line. There is some reality, just as we can see the basic shapes and some of the detail in the Mona Lisa as you view it in 2D on your monitor. And, as with the Mona Lisa, you miss the three dimensional details of how the paint was applied, and how the actual light of the physical space plays over the colors used by the master.

Similarly, we miss most of the fine structure of the people with whom we interact only in two dimensions. We miss the body language. We miss the cast of their eyes. We miss the pheromones which should be floating between us as we speak, We miss all of the little nuances that mean the difference between the truth and lies. We miss all of the little things that make the experience personal and real.

And that works two ways. We know that we are not going to have to actually physically touch a person in order to send them a virtual hug. We give many more hugs on line than in person. When the relative of an on-line friend dies and we express our sorrow, we know that we are not going to have to cook a casserole and take it over to the house. We will never have to make good on our sympathetic offers of help, because there is rarely anything that we can do at our far remove. This basic unreality applies in both directions, and colors everything we do in our on-line-only relationships. This situation is not alleviated greatly by hearing a voice, or seeing a photo or videos.

As with research, we get a lot of the bare facts but none of the experience. People are generally less inhibited on line, and will tell you more (and more intimate) things about themselves. At the same time, you learn less about them because they do not have to look you in the eye as they speak or, for that matter, avoid doing so.  Nor are you ever likely to tell their mother, or their co-workers. Of course, that does not really matter because you are not really there, either. The experiences are on a par with looking at a picture of a puppy on line and that of playing with a puppy in the park. They are nowhere near the same, on any level, emotional or logical.

None of that should detract from the pleasure derived from online experiences with people, as long as we understand the differnces. Those experience can be interesting. At the same time, whether or not they are “real” lies in the minds of the beholders. And that “reality” is changing with every sub-generation, as people become more and more used to interacting on line. They are losing, slowly but surely, what it means to interact with actual people, substituting virtual people for reality.

All of us do this to some extent, getting lost in virtual space, pretending that all those online experiences are somehow real, as if they were occurring among physical people on our living rooms. They are not, of course. That does not mean that they are bad. That simply means that we must keep the differences in mind, every time we interact on line. When we pretend that someone on line is as well known to us as our friends in 3D life, we are doing both groups a disservice.

As I said first in 1976, “Reality is that set of circumstances that we find most concrete at the moment.” On line reality has it’s own set of parameters, different than those of reality in the non-virtual world. Not better, not worse, just different. As we move between our different realities, we would do well to remember that some are more real than others, and to govern ourselves (and our minds) accordingly.

What do you think?

Plurktalk is a weekly live videocast that I do with several of my friends from Plurk. There’s more about it at this link. The first hour or two of the show is fun, joking around and personal stuff, mainly. Recently, we have been staying late into the night, often until one or two in the morning, talking about serious things, like what makes guys act like guys and gals act like gals? Are we what we are, in the main, due to nature or nurture? You know, things like that. There are not many of us that late, and we are not looking for a lot of new participants at this time. It gets complicated enough as it is.

For the show on July 22, I am going to try an experiment. We are going to read a text and form our discussion loosely around the parts of the text that strike each of us as being the most important and meaningful. Those will probably be different parts. That’s what makes this so much fun.

The text is the final book by Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, published after his death. It is a short, direct, to the point text that discusses every facet of our society as it exists today. Whether you agree with it or not, it is astonishingly intelligent and thought-provoking. The people that will be participating in the discussion will, of course, need to read the book. That would be helpful for those who just want to watch the ensuing mayhem and participate in the chat room, as well.

So far, the discussion panel on camera will be made up of myself, @pritcharddesign, and @Willfall. If you wish to participate in the discussion, you must be able to stay awake for the hours between 10:00 pm Central on June 22 and 1:00 am on June 23. You must read the book noted above. And you must be willing to appear on camera. If you think you would like to do this, send me a private plurk and I’ll think about it. No guarantees. Stickam gets way laggy with too many people on video.

Everyone is more than welcome to come to the first couple of hours of the show as usual, on or off camera and in the chat room. The chat room will definitely remain open during the Late Night portion, and you are welcomed to participate fully with us in that way, to comment at will and help us discuss the issues in that way. We will all be watching the chat window. That is how the big kids usually do it, I’m told. Still, only the selected few will be able to be on video or on microphone. If this works out, I’d like to have different guests on video each time we do a themed show, in addition to the usual panelists. We would love to have you on the show. The last few discussions have been fascinating. This one promises to be even better, and livelier.

Above all else in life, I despise the huge pointless egos and the terminally self-involved persons and personalities that surround us everywhere: in politics, in entertainment, in sports, in our personal lives, and yes, on Plurk. I feel like I am wearing out my welcome for the site on which I am writing this post. I have plurked about it every day for a week or so and am sure people are getting tired of hearing about it.

When Laura and I started Plurkfood, it was supposed to be a collaborative effort of sorts. I have thousands of recipes, almost all of which I have tried, and revised and tried again. Certainly, no one is interested in those.  The idea was to rely upon our fellow plurkers to tell us what they liked to eat, and that other plurkers would be interested in that.

As long as we promoted the site, the recipes kept rolling in. When we stopped, the recipes stopped. When they stopped, the site went into a deep coma, from which it has not yet awoken, unless you count that one recipe today. We hate to bomb the timeline with plurks asking for your recipes. I also hate to let it die, if only because I still think that we had a good idea.

So, what do you think we should do?

There aren’t a lot of people reading this post, maybe 30-35 a day on average. So your feedback will stand out from the silence. Should we start it back up again? Should we beg for recipes? Should we recruit co-editors and let them have access to the site to add recipes? Should we post our own recipes and food experiences? Or should we do something completely different?

Then, for better or worse, it dawned upon me that Plurk was the perfect place for online conversations and I was writing an online monologue, instead! That philosophical conundrum made little sense to me, and my posts at Plurkiverse became less frequent, then finally just petered out altogether. I have never gotten back to writing posts for Plurkiverse, and there is the tiniest uncomfortable tingling of guilt in the back of my mind because of it.

Still, I would much rather have a conversation than perform a monologue, especially where Plurk is concerned, since the conversation can take place on what would be the object of the monologue! If you happen by to look at my numbers, you will note that I spend a bit of time on Plurk (how else could you amass almost 140,000 responses?) and any time that I write about writing about Plurk would take away from the time that I am able to spend there.

Still, there is that guilty itch. I think of things every time I am on Plurk that would make a good Plurkiverse column. Some of those things are funny or silly, some of them would wind up being very controversial, and others would be deadly serious, indeed. Some part of me wants to write those posts, and another part of me wants to leave the site to grow and evolve on its own, without even the tiny influence that I could have on that organic process. The result is that I honestly don’t know whether I should continue to write about Plurk or not.

What do you think?

In speaking with a friend last night, I wondered what sort of name I should give to posts that have little to do with business, or with ?talents?, or even with sites or services. More like the post titled 101 things about me, but generally more contemplative. I, the writer, was searching for a word, but the visual artist was the person who supplied it. The word was “Musings.”

This then, is a meta-muse, or a muse about musing. A musing can be defined as a calm, lengthy, intent consideration done in a reflective manner. Musings are what allow us to model the world around us and to deal with that world according to our objectives, plans, ends, and desires. They are our thoughts about the universe, its inhabitants and processes, and our place in that mix. I plan to write any number of those. Our musings are us, are our essence, disembodied.

Why are morning and evening light the best lights for painting or taking photographs? Why are relationships so complicated? Why is mortality both certain and mystifying? How many Malaysian native warriors can dance on the head of a snare drum? Why is there really air? Why do our minds play the tricks they do in a misguided attempt to protect us, when in truth that effort usually does us ill? Why are we here at all, and and why should we not resign en masse?

You know, those sort of things.

I have alluded herein to being a writer. That has even brought comments, suggestions, and the idea (freely given by a wonderful person) that I use this blog as a vehicle to push my writing career along. So here is yet another post about writing, which may or may not be more interesting or better written than my previous post, that about having too many blue denim shirts.

Although I consider myself, now, to be a writer of fiction, that is almost certainly problematic. Other forms of writing, however give me a usable rationale, I believe, to say that I am a professional writer and be at least partially correct. Let’s look at a few of those before we come back to fiction.

I have written thousands of pages of non-fiction in pursuit of business goals, both mine and those of others. I have written reams of technical prose, including software and project documentation, again for myself and others. All of that has been for pay, one way or another. So I suppose that I have proven that I am a competent professional technical writer.

I am a blogger, which is to say (in my case) a short non-fiction writer, at a couple of levels. I have written hundreds of posts for my own blogs, with no thought of success or financial return. That’s not why I wrote them, nor is it why I write the posts here. I do it simply for the joy of expressing myself, of trying to say something about the world.

I also write technical columns in return for money. I’ve been doing that for quite a while, starting at itsbadbusiness.com, continuing on to BestBizWare.com, and now writing in a number of sections of the tech site Blorge.com. I don’t know what the total column count is, but I tend to write about sixty columns per month, so it is probably well over a thousand. I guess, since they are still sending money, I must be a professional blogger, another form of professional writer.

I have written a fair amount of poetry. The less said about that the better. If you wish to know why I feel that is the case, I refer you to: a frawg poem. That is fairly old, but I have not gotten much better. I am distinctly not a professional poet.

I am currently writing a non-fiction book, my first. It is about the tension between a society less than 100 years away from steam power and teams of horses, in stark contrast to a highly technical world in which technical complexity doubles every eighteen months. I have already had agents bite on that book, so I am sure it will sell. It is a salable property and idea, though it will never make anybody a lot of money. I would probably do almost as well to self-publish it.

Now we are back to the fiction. I have written two novels and begun a third. I have had a number of interested agents on the first, which is of the thriller genre, fiction written around an autobiographical core. A number if literary agents like it, but say that it is almost impossible for an unknown author to break in today because the publishing business is in such a state of upheaval. That may be true, or that may be a not unkind way to reject me. I have refused thus far to take advances on a book which may not be immediately publishable.

The second is a work of hard science fiction. It is probably salable, even today, because most of the sci-fi agents are inundated with fantasy. I refuse to write a book in which any plot problem can be solved by the sudden appearance of elves. The scarcity of my sort of work, and a backlog of older readers of Asimov and Niven, give it a good chance. Unfortunately, immediately after I finished it, the initial scientific premise was solved in a slightly different way than I wrote it, so it needs some rewriting.

The third, started but not finished, is also based on a core of fact (my father’s life), the story of three children orphaned during the depression and the later results of the scars of youth. I have, perhaps, another dozen or so treatments that would work as novels. Still, only two have been written to date, and I have not cashed a check for either. That is why I am not sure if I am a professional novelist or not. I have written novels, but have not taken money for them yet. I will leave it up to the reader to come up with a usable definition of “professional novelist” in this context.

Still, by most definitions, I am a professional writer. I probably will add a section of pages to this site for the use of self-promotion, although that is an activity at which I am abysmal. I will even consider putting some of my fiction on line, although I will need to do so only in part, and behind a membership firewall, to keep the agents and publishers happy. I know something about that, since I am also the editor in chief of a Web-zine.

So, I guess I do indeed scribble, all the time and with a certain purpose. As I said in another post, it is what I have always wanted to do. I may need some new territory to explore, though. Any suggestions?

I am, however, enough of a guy that I like blue, and especially that I like blue denim. When I came across a spectacular sale on denim short-sleeved shirts with button-down collars, I was in heaven. All of my shirt needs could be met for a mere $6.50 per shirt! So I purchased three. I try very hard to line up those shirts that are in season and therefore eligible for wearing in the closet in the order I should wear them at the end of wash day.

In looking at the vlog thumbnails on Youtube, I realized that I am still sometimes grabbing shirts out of order. And when I do, it is almost invariably the blue denim shirts that I grab. When I wash in the middle of the week, I have noticed that there is always a blue denim shirt or two in the mix. I’m not sure what that says about me except maybe that I aspire to be the blue version of Johnny Cash’s black. Silly though, as I have no discernible talent.

Anyway, all those blue shirts are not dirty. They just match my 501s so well, I guess. Worse, if I were to find those shirts again in something like my size, I would buy more. Maybe what I should do is take them in and have a white number monogrammed on each pocket, you know, like one through seven. That would at least let me wear them without fear of consternation.

I generally don’t give a damn what other people think. Still, I guess I don’t want folks thinking that my shirt hygiene sucks. So, if I happen to appear again in videos on consecutive days wearing a blue denim shirt, please bear with me. I am but a simple man, and I wear but simple clothing, when possible. And button-fly jeans and denim shirts are the simplest clothes in town.